


With Thee

by Katherine



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-23 04:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10712604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: "I grieve with thee." David Marcus spoke the words of Vulcan ritual to her in Standard, with Human sincerity.





	With Thee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lah_mrh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lah_mrh/gifts).



The strains of the human hymn "Amazing Grace" seemed, illogically, to still resound within her hearing. The funeral for Spock was complete. An archaic ritual, some part of her editorialised; that was not the small not the part which wished to attain being properly Vulcan. Yet rituals were a near-universal accompaniment to death, and they shaped the experience of grieving.

"I grieve with thee." David Marcus spoke the words of Vulcan ritual to her in Standard, with Human sincerity.

Apart from David's presence, she was alone in this stretch of corridor.

She did not wish to remain alone.

 

It was unexpected how within weeks she had become accustomed to David's presence next to her in the narrow, standard-issue bed.

Quickly, also, he came to know how Vulcan she was not. How (as human stories put it) hot her blood ran. Often his cool fingers traced her scars.

This night, his hands were moving over her with gentleness. Lightly. Skimming, she decided. Patterns of language and allusion (birds over sea-waves on an ocean-rich world) spun outwards in her mind from the word. David's touch was, this time, insufficient in distracting her from her ordered thoughts.

She put her face by his, angling in order to contact his ear with her mouth. "You need not be so gentle," she told him, low. Then set her teeth's edge to the side of his neck.

After that, he was not.

 

David was leaning against the wall of her quarters immediately inside the door. There was an aspect in the confident slouch that reminded Saavik of what she had seen in his father. Those resemblances were rarely relevant, yet she noted them, putting together her own observations of David with those she had made of Admiral James Kirk. There was also the data from the stories Spock had shared with her about his captain.

"I'm not sure what the crew thinks I'm spending time with you doing," David pointed out, familiar human laughter underlying his tone. Saavik raised a brow, silently implying that he should continue.

David added, as if quoting, "There's ways Vulcans don't pass the time."

"I am not," Saavik reminded him, "wholly Vulcan."

David showed a smile as he brought himself further into the room. "I know that," he said, smug and intimate.

Saavik essayed a joke. "I shall be especially Vulcan, and play chess with you."

 

Chess was not one of their chosen pastimes. Yet they did not spend all their shared time in physical intimacies.

They talked together often. One recent evening, he listened intently as she went into detail about her analysis of the readings she had made in her duty shift. That was far more detail than most humans had patience for, and thus beyond what she had mentioned while on the bridge. It was a relief to not constrain her thoughts.

In addition, the two of them ate together when schedules and the availability of rations allowed. Tonight, as David was slicing a fruit with careful precision, the removed peel an irregular spiral next to him.

Saavik remembered the fruit he had offered to her and Doctor McCoy. That had been fresh-picked in the stage of Genesisthat was life grown within a lifeless planetoid.

When McCoy had drifted from them, muttering to himself about the forms of life, David smiled at her. From the manner in which he described the work to her, he was proud, indeed almost smug, of the success of the Genesis project thus far. After some of this, he rolled one shoulder in a shrug and said, "I've been doing this since I was a kid, actually. And you..."

David had questioned her, then, politely, about her own work. (Studies, Saavik corrected him, noting where she had reached within Starfleet Academy.) David was curious without assumption. Unlike most, he would not insist she meet his own concept for what was Vulcan, nor query her departure from that. He was a scientist whose area of study, as well as any wish for explanations, lay in other areas than her heritage or behaviour.

When in the night David put his hand to her face she could smell the bitter-tart of the fruit peel's inner surface left on his skin. She put her hand on top of his, adjusting his hand to nearer her mouth, and touched the tip of her tongue to his thumb.

 

The cavern within the Regula planetoid; born of the same project as the planet on which she now stood. She spoke into the communicator, somehow managing to keep her tone Vulcan-level. "David is injured." However, so far as she could determine from sight alone, not seriously. The Klingon blade had entered, not his chest where the human heart lies, but below and off-centre. The long gash down his side seeped red blood, but slowly. 

This wrongly-made world was heaving itself to pieces, but all three of them still lived. As she and David stood together, their hands were intertwined, and behind them was the child who was her mentor renewed.

 

It was only after all were aboard the Klingon vessel, a safe distance away from Genesis, course set for Vulcan, that Saavik had time alone with David to talk together. He shoved his hand through his curly hair before speaking. "I wanted to take the knife. But," his breathing stuttering strangely into a laugh, "I imagined you saying 'sacrifice is illogical'."

Sacrifice could be logical, at need. Spock had let the radiation burn him to what was his death (what had not remained his ending) for the sake of all the Enterprise's crew.

So soon before, the Enterprise, the that ship Spock as well as his Kirk had loved, had marked her own funeral fire across the sky. (A human habit, metaphor and allusion.)

Sacrifice was sometimes the logical course, but never one ungrieved.

Saavik imagined David throwing himself in front of her, his red blood spurting, his death on the remade world of Genesis.

The loss of the Enterprise, the restoration of Spock, the documentation of all that went wrong with the Genesis project; none of these were insurmountable, nor hers to solve. Spock lived, and Saavik herself, and David. At that moment, because he had escaped to be alive beside her, she reached for his hand and found words: "I rejoice with thee."


End file.
